I’ve been trying to find a perfect solution for sharing with you the sex news I read on a daily basis. Before it was sold to Yahoo! (where great ideas go to die of neglect and user alienation), I liked Delicous – but I never gelled with the way I wanted to blend it into the way I present this blog. I want to give you the access to see what I’m reading, when I read it. I also want to post more often than the every-few-days “Nibbles” posts. Those are great because I give you opinion and POV on articles/posts – but they are time consuming for a variety of reasons. So, some items don’t go up ASAP, and some are up-to-the-minute items, and that isn’t ideal.
I don’t want to auto-post individual links inline on the blog because for one item to be of single-post material, it needs to have a wider application, be an evolving story, connect to a story we’ve been following, or provide something meaty for us to talk about, or for me to rant about. When I edited Fleshbot, I enjoyed curating the “morning wood” post of 6-8 daily news items; but I quit FB for a variety of reasons, and the 12-15 posts a day grind was never something I thought made sense to truly engaged readers. At the same time, my goal here is always to post more – just not to treat our space here like a content farm.
I have a lot of thought and theory behind the way I present and share this information. I care about your experience and hate the way other sites try to force me to consume their content. If you have thoughts, or something you’d like to see more of, or would like to see me do, let me know. I want to take this site to where I want it to be, and this year I want to extend a smart and savvily implemented community out of it. I’m tired of creating community on other sites only to see it taken away once we start to make a difference, to ourselves, each other, and the word. I think that sites like Facebook are actually bad for communities, and sites like Flickr just depress me with their misunderstanding of true sharing (and boundaries).
So, the problem of sharing articles. I read dozens a day. I don’t want to turn something like my Twitter into a linkspam of ‘omg look’ because it’s one of the only social sites I really love, and I like hanging out and being a person there, and getting to know people – meaning, it’s not a one-way channel and I refuse to treat it like that.
In my dream situation, I would have something on this site like a blend of Techmeme and Reddit, but for sex – and under my own (and our community’s) control. Meaning, an auto-compiled aggregator of top news stories and actual blog posts on sex, porn and erotica, with the ability for me to manually add, delete and curate, and for registered (real) users to submit (to subvert spamming, illegal content and gaming), with a bare-bones comment and upvote system.
I’m always dreaming.
At this point, I’m going to use Instapaper. You’ll notice that in the left-hand column today I put together a widget of sex stories I’m reading right now – pulled from my Instapaper “saved for later” via the bookmarklet. Watch that for 24-7 activity. Not kidding, I sleep on very weird cycles. Until Instapaper or a motivated dev creates a way for people to embed daily “saved” stories in a WordPress post, I’m going to grab my reads of the day (unless I’m on deadline, traveling, etc.) and put them into a simple post here. If you’d like me to make a separate page of these posts only, so you can just see the “Nibbles” news posts on a page, with “Nibbles” archives, let me know and I’ll make one and put it in the top tabs.
Here’s a bit of what I read today:
* Porn Company Rejects Mass Lawsuits, Goes After Torrent Sites | TorrentFreak (torrentfreak.com)
If they thought about what viewers needed, they’d stop wasting their time with bittorrent.
* The Science of Kissing: Why Do We Do It? – Culture – GOOD (good.is, thanks CrusherJoe!)
This book looks interesting – you could pair it with my Seal It With A Kiss!
* BBC News – Turkish academics sacked over porn dissertation project (bbc.co.uk)
Fun fact: Turkey was one of the countries that allegedly complained to Libya about vb.ly’s “obscenity”
* Channel 4 show that teaches teens Kama Sutra positions labelled `porn` (sify.com, thanks Kumi!)
This was major controversy in the UK sex circles this weekend.
* Kamil Pasha » Total Lowering (kamilpasha.com)
Sexuality in Turkey: fight about a racy window display reveals attitudes, via CrusherJoe.
* Turkey Brothels | Transgender Rights | Istanbul | Tourism (globalpost.com)
Yet Turkish sexuality is a layered industry: photos from a trans brothel.
* The Abstract Factory: Sexual desire, authenticity, and Internet business models (abstractfactory.blogspot.com)
I’m going to take The Atlantic’s failure of an article about the evils of porn apart (and its author) brick by brick. This post is a great retort.
Image: Illona from this gallery.
This seems to be what Tumblr is for! Not sure how you’d embed it to Tiny Nibbles necessarily, but there’s quite the community vibe happening there.
Very thoughtful and interesting post. Clearly you pour exhausting energy into your work and research, then do your readers such a favor by synthesizing. The instapaper widget is promising – gives us a sense of the various items that catch your attention and might influence without reaching the level of being highlighted in your posts. So if readers want to do a little work, they can dig more into what you’ve been digging into. Great idea.
“Community” is such a pervasive term yet everything is a matter of degree. Those in broadcast mode give false impressions of community, yet it’s somewhat understandable that they have limited time for community development if they’re off in other worlds with their focus. Given the prolific volume of work you crank out, it’s admirable that you’re seeking community, because clearly when you use the term, you add the best of intentions with meaning.
This is your baby – congratulations and thanks for all the effort and brilliance!
Finishing on a lighter note and related to the synthesizing issue, just thought this was interesting from a Nov 17 post: http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Summarize
the trans brothel pictures were interesting, to a point. i found them to be without context and reinforcing of societal stereotypes of transperson’s acceptable roles in society, and as a TG/GQ this is always galling. the reality of these women’s lives is not likely what any of them might chose (or at least a minority- i have known women who were happy in their sex work) but what is available. the squalor of their apt was better than no apt but still sad and sobering….
how about more TG/GQ stuff here- we are out here and not getting much positive play!
Thank you, Michael!
Bacchus, I’m with you on this. How is there not a WP plugin for submissions?
This:
“It’s really weird to live in a word where the limits on what I want to do do are limned by software that I can imagine, but not obtain.”
This is my life. Every day.
Interesting. I’m keenly aware of the intense friction between the dozens of things I look at daily, and the one or two that I post about — there’s got to be an easier way to gesture at what’s interesting and vital today. But drudging through the mechanics of a WordPress post? Too much friction, and too much else to do.
Like you, I haven’t found a perfect solution.
I also need something that hovers over what I’m viewing like a Tumblr “reblog this” button, but it has to be really smart — none of the bookmarklets and such that I’ve played with are anything like functional enough.
I could also use a WordPress plugin that does something like the hand-rolled BoingBoing submitterator. Could use it hard and put it away wet every night. I’ve made half-a-dozen attempts at coding that one myself, but it’s defeated me every time.
It’s really weird to live in a word where the limits on what I want to do do are limned by software that I can imagine, but not obtain.
Wise words mate, wise words. Now I’ve got to work out what an instapaper is and if it will make my life better.